1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to surgical procedures known as lung transplantation. In particular, the present invention relates to the use of an exogenous pulmonary surfactant for improving the clinical outcome of such a surgical procedure.
2. Discussion of the Background
Lung transplantation is a surgical procedure that should be considered for patients with advanced lung disease whose clinical status has progressively declined. Although successful lung transplantations were first performed in the 1980s, lung transplants have become widely used only as a result of a variety of improvements in the methodologies of such procedures. Thus improvements in, for example, donor management, donated lung preservation, immuno-suppression methods for preventing rejection of donated lungs by the lung transplant recipient, and infection-curing therapies for post-surgical recovery, have all contributed to a rise in the number of such transplantations performed worldwide.
Despite the general successfulness of lung transplantation methods, there is still a variety of serious and, in some cases, lethal consequences of these procedures such as for example ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury or even more severe consequences such as primary graft dysfunction and bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS).
In particular, since the I/R injury syndrome resembles very closely the ARDS syndrome, the administration of exogenous pulmonary surfactant during lung transplantation has been proposed. For instance, WO 2008/154151 discloses a method wherein the pulmonary surfactant is administered after the patient has received the lung transplant.
However, despite of the aforementioned improvements, there is still a need to develop more effective methods to prevent the adverse effects associated with lung transplantation.
Moreover, the widespread application of lung transplantation is limited by the shortage of suitable donor organs resulting in longer waiting times for listed patients with a substantial risk of dying prior to transplantation. Therefore, there is also a need of improved methods for the optimal utilization of the available donor lung pool.
These drawbacks have been mitigated by the method of the present invention that provides a real improvement over therapies described in the art.